1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to monitoring the deliverability of email messages for a list of intended recipients and more particularly to such a method using subscriber and seed deliverability data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Bulk senders of electronic mail (email) messages often send a large number of copies of an email message to many different recipients as part of an “email campaign”. Email campaigns may be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes but often target a specific set of recipients and are designed to achieve a particular goal (e.g., increase sales volume, boost donations, etc.).
When a bulk email sender (hereinafter, “sender”) creates an email campaign, it is desirable for the sender to be able to measure the effectiveness of that email campaign through monitoring various deliverability statistics for the email messages associated with a campaign. One example of a deliverability statistic that may be monitored includes an indication of the number, or percentage, of intended recipients who actually received the email in their inboxes as a proportion of the total number of intended recipients of the campaign.
One method for measuring the success of an email campaign includes using seed deliverability data to monitor email placement. For example, the sender may maintain its own set of email accounts (seed accounts) with various email service providers, such as ISPs, and include those email address accounts in their email campaign. The sender may then monitor its seed email accounts as samples to determine how the email campaign messages were delivered. One drawback to using seed data only is that it typically only provides a statistical result derived from a small sample of email addresses. Another drawback is that those seed accounts are otherwise unused and are not used to send email, subscribe to information lists, or given to third parties. Because seed accounts are not associated with actual human users, they cannot interact with the emails providing “engagement” metrics which could impact folder placement of messages. For example, seed accounts cannot add to an address book, open an email, click through an email, forward an email, or reply to an email. As a result, seed accounts may not be representative of actual email accounts.
Another method used to monitor email placement includes using subscriber deliverability data associated with actual human recipients of the campaign. Conventionally, subscriber data has been obtained from larger ISPs, such as Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, and Hotmail, and email folder placement for those ISPs has been determined based on a categorization as either globally good, and delivered to the recipient's inbox, or categorized as globally bad, and either placed in the recipient's junk folder or discarded by the ISP. However, ISPs are increasingly filtering email using individual user-level settings, which take into account user behavior, such as engagement with the email (e.g., opened, deleted, read, etc).
Therefore, a drawback to using subscriber data only is that the visibility of a sender's email campaign may be limited or, in other words, the subscriber data may not be representative of all intended recipients. Because a sufficient quantity of data is often only available from a few large ISPs, there is often not enough subscriber data to provide comprehensive monitoring of all of the ISPs that may be associated with the intended recipients of the campaign. Another drawback is that identifying which campaigns are important from a list of campaigns is difficult. For example, with subscriber campaigns, a sender might receive a large number of non-important campaigns to sift through to see result. Yet another drawback is that while subscriber data can only show folder placement data (e.g., inbox or bulk) if the email was placed in a recipient's mailbox, seed data can show “missing” emails. Missing is an indication that there is a full block at the ISP, which would result in zero subscriber data being available.
One prior art solution for identifying email campaigns is described in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2009/0077182 to Banjara et al. Banjara discloses a system and method for identifying email campaigns using special custom email message headers, called x-headers. An email sender adds an x-header that identifies the sending company and perhaps also the email campaign. The email sender may then ask the ISP of the mail recipient whether the ISP blocked any emails with a specified x-header. One significant limitation of this x-header based system is that it requires coordination between the email sender, the ISPs of the recipients, and a specialized email delivery services provider employed by the sender. All parties must also be informed about the content of the x-header in advance of the email campaign, and it cannot determine if email messages were opened or simply diverted to a spam folder. (See paragraphs [0033]-[0034] of Banjara.) Banjara is hereby incorporated by reference.
Accordingly, there is a need to overcome the shortcomings described above regarding subscriber-only deliverability data or seed-only deliverability data in order to achieve broader and more accurate monitoring of email marketing campaigns.